All that stuff about the pen being mightier than the sword — Athol Fugard believes it. He’s lived it.

In his native South Africa, he spent decades battling apartheid, the officially sanctioned racism that oppressed blacks in favor of whites. He battled it by writing and staging plays, by using words as bright lights shined into dark corners.

Police searched his house for evidence of subversion, hauled him in for interrogations. He kept writing. They seized his passport, followed him around. He kept writing.

Apartheid is dead, and Fugard is still writing. Now approaching 80, with some three-dozen plays penned, with a theater in Cape Town named after him, the Del Mar resident can look back and admit that maybe he made a difference.

“I write plays which I hope will open people’s eyes to something they didn’t want to look at before, or to things they might not have known even existed,” he said. “That’s the evil of prejudice: It’s rooted in ignorance.”

The occasion for looking back is the National Peacemaker Award he is receiving Thursday from the San Diego-based National Conflict Resolution Center. This is the 23rd year the nonprofit organization has been honoring individuals and organizations for their “creative and effective” solutions to conflict.

“Under great duress, Athol Fugard took a stand against the government, against the hatred and bigotry associated with apartheid, by using the vehicle of theater to bring a voice to the voiceless,” said Steven Dinkin, president of the resolution center.

Fugard said he is “humbled” by the award. “If you look at what’s going on in the world around us, to be singled out as worthy of a peacemaking prize is really something,” he said. “I’m not a bloody politician. I’m just a playwright, a writer.”

He didn’t have time to think of himself as a peacemaker back in the early days, some 50 years ago, when he was writing spare, searing dramas like “Blood Knot” and defying South African law by having black and white actors appear together on the same stage.

Still, peace was always on his mind.

“I wanted it so desperately,” he said. “I knew for certain that the only way we would get there was not with bombs or bullets, but with talking. I have a really strong feeling that the arts and theater in particular did contribute to the climate that enabled us to move away from everybody arming themselves to destroy each other, and instead sitting down and trying to talk ourselves into a new way, a new order.”

Talk, of course, is what plays are all about, and Fugard’s gift for it once prompted Time Magazine to call him “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.” His 1974 play “Sizwe Bansi is Dead” earned its two main actors a joint Tony Award. His novel “Tsotsi” was turned into a film that won an Academy Award in 2006.

Because of his apartheid-related work, he’s often labeled a “political” writer, but many of his works are more personal than pointed, and most are autobiographical in some way. (It’s not hard, for example, to see Fugard in Mr. M, the teacher in “My Children! My Africa!” who urges his students to choose dialogue over violence.)

If there’s a thread that connects all of his pieces, he said, it’s “just the humanity of the people we are usually blind to, the poor of any society. I was on record once saying I am more interested in the little hovels people live in, the squatters camps, than I am in the Taj Mahal, and it’s true. I think I’d be bored by the Taj Mahal.”

His plays frequently feature strong women, too — a nod to his mother, who was strong enough to live with an alcoholic husband, strong enough to run a boarding house, strong enough to scrub floors to pay for Fugard’s college education. And strong enough to offer her blessing when he decided to drop out a few months shy of graduation so he could chase the writing life.

Ask him, then, if he thinks the world would be better off — if peace would be given more of a chance — with women in charge, he hesitates. “There are some bad eggs in that basket as well,” he said, and mentions a former governor of Alaska in particular.

“But I take your point,” he added. “When I think of my wife, of my daughter, of all my friends who are women, what always strikes me is their magnificent capacity for caring and nurturing that is just not there in men.”

The bigger question, with his adopted country at war (he’s lived in Del Mar for about a decade), is why peace remains so elusive.

“Man is an animal,” he said. “I don’t know about being made in God’s image, honestly. We’re animals, and animals fight for survival.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s given up trying. He’s still writing plays, and recently he’s decided to be the first to stage the new ones, as director. He’s off to South Africa in a few weeks to do one there.

“It’s very traumatizing to me, because I don’t cope well with bad reviews,” he said. “But when I’m the one who puts it on the stage, I’m not out to prove as director that I’m clever or smart. I don’t feel I have to leave my stamp on it. The play’s the thing.”

He turns 80 next year, a number that excites him. “Being 78 or 79, that looks like nothing on paper,” he said. “But 80, that’s really something. I want to be 80. So for once I am taking great care of my health.”

There are plans to recognize the birthday with productions of some of his most important plays next year in New York, and maybe in London and South Africa. He’s flattered, and a little embarrassed — embarrassed, he said, because he’s being celebrated for work he had little choice in doing.

“I can’t hit a nail in straight, man,” he said, laughing while he remembered failed attempts to become a carpenter, an electrician, a car mechanic. “I’m incompetent at everything except the one thing I’ve managed to do with a modicum of success.”